Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 21st Apr 2008 19:00 UTC, submitted by Adam S
Ars' Peter Bright wrote an article today entitled "From Win32 to Cocoa: a Windows user's conversion to Mac OS X", in which he explains why he believes "Windows is dying, Windows applications suck, and Microsoft is too blinkered to fix any of it". These are rather harsh words, but there is a definitive element of truth in it. The article is part one in a three-part series.
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Member since:2005-07-07
Now, if you need to tightly integrate with the OS you might wanna learn Cocoa. Much like just knowing QT isn't enough to write an app that tightly integrates with KDE or knowing Java isn't enough to integrate with Windows.
But that is a whole other issue in itself...I'm against apps that integrate that much into the environment.
But that is a whole other issue in itself...I'm against apps that integrate that much into the environment.
Carbon has always been billed as a transitional API. It was obvious right from the start that it wasn't always going to be available. It's purpose was to help developers port their existing applications to OS X, before transitioning to Cocoa.
Guess it didn't work too well, given how many commercial apps remained Carbon. It was only the announcement that there will be no 64 bit Carbon that has spurred these software houses like Adobe to start seriously looking at Cocoa.
Member since:2005-07-06
Carbon has always been billed as a transitional API. It was obvious right from the start that it wasn't always going to be available.
It was never going to work. Transitional APIs never do, because they never are transitional. Once you put it out there people start using it.
Guess it didn't work too well, given how many commercial apps remained Carbon. It was only the announcement that there will be no 64 bit Carbon that has spurred these software houses like Adobe to start seriously looking at Cocoa.
Shock, horror. There is zero return on investment to Adobe or anyone else in rewriting their applications from Carbon to Cocoa!
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Which part of cross-platform did you fail to understand? You're not writing KDE applications here. That's a downright bizarre thing to come out with.
Java isn't the best option, certainly now that Apple has crippled it in OS X, but if you have different platforms to code for then it's silly not to look at cross-platform options. Also, cross platform options such as Java and Qt can insulate you from the stupidity of Apple when they create APIs they know they will drop.
Yer, and you can do that to a very large extent without having to rewrite your application for Cocoa from Carbon. Score to Qt.
Apple doesn't get developers, and that has been ably demonstrated over a period of many years. API breakages, APIs being plain dropped, telling developers not to use something but making it available anyway (copying pointers out of the jump table for example) and outright hardware platform changes. If you value developers, you can't take that stuff back. You have to make it work, and up until fairly recently, that was the view Microsoft took. If you want to see how successful Microsoft's new direction is, look at the uptake and support for Vista and platforms such as.Net versus XP, 2000 and previous Windows versions.
If you must develop for a Mac, get yourself a nice big wrapper, and preferably a cross platform development tool, not just for the flexibility of cross platform porting, but to insulate yourself from Apple's stupidity. The Cocoa versus Carbon debate is the same as the Winforms versus WPF one in the Windows world. Why does it even exist in the first place?
As for the article, when there are the number of applications written for the Mac, both shrink-wrapped and especially internal applications, as there are on Windows, he can give us a call and make a comparison. That's what it all boils down to, no matter how much more 'passionate' he perceives Mac developers to be and no matter how much Microsoft wants you to re-write stuff in the shiny new .Net. A lot of stuff is written with Win32 and COM.
Edited 2008-04-22 12:12 UTC